schism
by justbecauseofthis
Summary: Crime and violence still plague the inner cities despite Historia's Restoration Campaign. After she requests Squad Levi's help, they discover a terrorist group with a treasonous plan. Meanwhile, Historia secretly struggles with her feelings for Mikasa and approaches Eren for advice and support. [Historia/Mikasa][Eren/Mikasa]***MANGA SPOILERS (takes place during time-skip)
1. Chapter 1

**Author note:** The translation I've been reading refers to Eren's worshipers as the Yaegerists; and even my printed volumes use that translation. In this story, there's a group called the Jaegerites. But I think in some versions, Yaegerists is translated as Yaegerites or something. Anyway, my made-up faction is supposed to be separate from the faction in cannon. They're supposed to be more extreme; a cult of terrorists, I guess. I couldn't think of a name, so I'm just using Jaegerites.

* * *

The ceiling rises, retracting, growing smaller. Her body wafts slowly downward. Darkness covers her for miles.

Only when her eyes come open does Mikasa realize her eyes have shut. Though she doesn't feel the impact, doesn't register any of the blows, she knows she's been hit. Hard. The rubber mat throbs where she lies prone on her back in a stupor, not feeling the blow anywhere on her body.

The ceiling revolves in a steady motionless wheel.

From out of the corner and into her view, Captain Levi's face floats, marooned. Behind his head, the revolving ceiling slows. It goes still. The captain shows no sign of effort or strain. His lips move. Mikasa feels her ear drum contracting, hearing nothing.

The room puts itself back together. The floor aligns to the walls. The mat attaches to her feet. She squares up. Captain Levi never seems to move a muscle, never seems to lift his hands before her legs are slung out, the floor rushing up from nowhere, her body slapping hard like a fish. The mat vibrates in the recoil.

She lies prone again, the rest of the world unfolding into those peaceful vertiginous revolutions, turning in a motionless spiral. She watches the world revolve, lying at the epicenter of all motion everywhere.

A hand reaches down with all five fingers extended. With his head slightly bent, Eren Jaeger looms, his long shapeless hair encompassing the frame of his dark face. Mikasa flings out her arm and grabs Eren's hand and pulls, and he pulls. Her body lifts. The two legs fall into place, set into standing position like a pair of flax trousers draped from a hanger. Their hands withdraw. The ceiling goes still.

When Eren Jaeger starts to speak, he speaks furtively, not looking at Mikasa, not facing her. Mirrors wall the room, and by looking at them, Mikasa can see Eren from different angles. All shapeless hair, his face dark and unreadable, almost a man now, wearing the shirt he always wears with the tie-cords in the collar and brown rubber-tread shoes that are more thread than rubber. Cryptically he stands with his shoulders forward, looking tall, with long muscled limbs and a long muscled back.

"Haven't you noticed?" Eren says.

"Noticed?" Mikasa says.

Silently he begins walking to the side of the room and he walks unhurriedly the way a person who has been walking for a long time walks unhurriedly, walking in his rubber-soled shoes which are more thread than rubber like he's already been walking in them for an eternity. She follows a little behind and measures that Eren's pace is not as slow as it appears; that he only appears slow-moving because of the length of his full-grown stride. Each one stride, she measures, corresponds to one and a half of hers.

Eren stops, turns, faces her. He speaks furtively again. Just behind him, the mirror reflects the back of his shapeless hair, reflecting Mikasa as she listens, her face lifted in attention.

"You pick up new abilities quickly, Mikasa, just by observing others." She doesn't have to lean in to hear him. She doesn't have to do anything but look at him to hear what he is saying. "The strongest person in this world doesn't have to be Captain Levi."

"He has more experience," she says. "And he's stronger than I am."

Before the words are out of her mouth, darkness claps over her again. This time Mikasa knows she hasn't fallen, her eyes clasping shut from suddenness and surprise. The collision itself Mikasa doesn't feel, but she hears from the inside the blunt internal knock at the front of her skull as Eren's head connects, their foreheads clashing.

Mikasa wrenches one eye open. Too close to make sense of, Eren's face is a jumbled assortment of facial parts in oversize.

"You either place too much confidence in his abilities or not enough in your own."

Deep in the black well of Eren's pupil, behind where Mikasa's own face suspends, slightly elliptical, in miniature; deep in Eren's eye, behind the consciousness, behind any sort of beacon or soul, other cryptic images glint like scattered pieces of something formerly whole and intact, floating broken in drops of liquid. In a neat line stand the shadows of people, of strangers, but they aren't actually strangers. It is the ageless line of ancestry she should've known but never could've remembered, silently forgotten in one hundred years of secret genocide, staring out at her in staggered rows through shadowed merciless eyes. They extend back in retrograde endlessly until the immeasurable pyramid of ancestral dead people concentrates into a focal point at the origin of all human history. She doesn't know how she knows this and she doesn't know how Eren would know how to tell her about it without saying a word, and how she could hear him without doing anything to listen, simply holding eye contact, forever, saying nothing.

She starts to back away, but Eren grabs the back of her head, forcing their faces together. They compress at the forehead, him locking her there, as if he's transmitting knowledge and encrypted messages directly into her brain matter. Her teeth come down and grind upon each other. The shadows dart and tear behind his eyes in a tumultuous blur. Time no longer passes, their faces still compressed together. Standing there face to face in all time, she watches Eren grow into an old man, sprouting long white hair, his face reduced to cartilage and gaunt cheekbones, his skeleton draped loosely with unpadded skin. Finally, he releases her. Mikasa twists away, touching the pulsation in the center of her head, at the point of entry where he has poured inside her the impossible unknown.

Eren leans back against the wall. He crosses his arms. "You're Mikasa Ackerman. That should be enough," he says, "the way I see it." He's not an old man, not a boy. Not a grown man or child. There's no age to him at all.

"Yeah." Mikasa tugs her gloves on tight. Her knuckles seat fully into the padding. She starts toward the sparring mat. Eren watches. Jean has already stalked halfway across the room, outrage blazing on his neck and face. Eren continues watching Mikasa, the bellied muscle working in her legs and arms, effortlessly, like an infallible machine. Then Eren turns his head, removing his eyes at the last second, to put them on Jean.

"What the hell was that about?" Jean says, jabbing his neck out, putting his face in Eren's face.

"None of you thought to say anything 'cause any way you think about it, she can't win against Captain Levi." Eren doesn't blink, leaned back, slanted against the silver panes of mirror. Even Jean's ear lobes blaze. Eren continues: "I believe in Mikasa's abilities. That's all."

Jean's mouth opens. It closes. His face looks a bit swollen like a balloon. Eren's eyes cut back to Mikasa. Then without moving his face, Eren raises his hand with his elbow bent, just in front of him, his upturned wrist extended. He closes his fingers into a fist; the cords and veins inflate. With his face still unmoving, his eyes drop to his own extended hand, but he doesn't seem to see it. His lips form a hollow shape, the lips drawing backward into a wide silent vowel, the tongue touching the roof of his mouth in a consonant. A complete word has been said, unvoiced, and Jean watches, trying to read it, the word escaping him.

Then Jean looks at Mikasa. Her fist has extended in front of her, her lips moving the same as Eren's, saying the same unvoiced word to herself. Eren's fist falls, relaxed, against his thigh. Mikasa tenses her gloves in front of her, getting ready. Eren pushes off the wall, walking away.

"Aren't you going to watch?" Jean gains more and more volume the further Eren gets. "Hey, hey—You're just going to leave?" Eren turns out the door, nobody listening now. "You're going to leave after that stunt you just pulled?" The air is warm where Eren had been standing, nobody there to hear Jean anymore, just talking to warm molecules now. "Fine, then. Leave, you bastard. Nobody will notice."

Indignant and outraged, Jean curses a little then stalks with balled hands to where the others have gathered to watch Mikasa and Captain Levi spar. Next to Armin he stands on two stiff legs, his arms crossed with his shoulders flared, glaring at whatever his eyes touch.

"Don't make that face," Jean says. Armin has an expression like he's already seen the outcome, already filled with sympathetic defeat. "It might be different this time. You don't know it. So stop making that face."

"She's already past her limit," Armin says, looking and sounding expectantly fatalistic. "She's being too stubborn."

"Don't you guys get the feeling," Sasha says, crouched next to Connie, "that they're actually two scary people when they're fighting each other? Watching them gives me the creeps." She shudders.

"What are you even saying? Don't watch, then."

"Aren't you people ever quiet?" Floch's voice is abrupt, harsh. He stands on the other side of Connie, four people away from Jean in their five-man line, clumped along the sparring mat. "Just watch—_or don't watch_—in silence." They grow quiet. Their eyes fix to the two figures getting ready on the sparring mat, both in shorts, both shirtless, both bodies wrought with the severe lines of physical conditioning. Mikasa's arms ripple, braced and ready, her chin lowered in a savage calm. "Hey. Where did Eren go?"

"Shut up."

Captain Levi's hands remain, complacent, at his sides. He gauges Mikasa, observing, concluding that something has changed, though he doesn't know what it is that's changed. It is a change that can be detected but not identified. Mikasa's hands drop marginally. Just over where her gloves sit, tensed, her eyes glare coldly at him; the change shows in her eyes like it's only inside the eyes where the change has occurred. But it's not that her sight has changed, he thinks. No. The manner of sight hasn't changed at all.

She advances. He watches and reads her, thinking that she's changed. Despite her speed, he blocks and avoids, suffering one oblique blow across the forearm. He falls back again, observing.

The change is not in her sight, he thinks, but in how she sees. Laying him out under observation, taking him into the eyes, and turning him end over end, seeing him through something beyond human faculties.

They volley a few times with their fists. She's changed from then to now, he thinks, even the weight of her hands has changed.

The match carries on.

Winding back an arm, Levi amasses power and releases it, shifting strength from his shoulder, down his arm, through the forearm. His fist crosses, hard and fast, over his left side. It never connects. Just as his fist should connect, Mikasa's glove slams square into his cheek a microsecond faster than he can move. He braces and guards. For some time she bashes him, getting in as many hits as she can, him accepting it, unresisting, protecting his head, waiting for her to grow tired. The blows begin to deteriorate. He slips free.

Gasping for breath, he thinks, _That's what I was going to do,_ and eyes her sharply,_ that's what I was in the middle of doing and she beat me to it. But she couldn't have beat me to it. She wasn't even reading me when I was getting ready. She wasn't even looking when I swung. It's like I was thinking but my thoughts fired in the wrong direction and spoke to her body instead of mine and she did what I was thinking, only doing it faster than I could, amassing an equal degree of power as I began to shift my own power to my fist, and as I was busy doing that, she calculated the exact degree to the exact angle, matching it, and just scarcely exceeded it to beat me by a microsecond. _

Across the mat, in the space between her raised gloves, Mikasa's black eyes are sharp and very still.

He thinks, _I don't know who I'm even fighting anymore._

This time Levi advances first.

Just as before, she matches him exactly. His own movements communicate through her. In an instant, she executes what he's spent decades refining, using his own combat against him, making him fight himself. He isn't facing an opponent anymore. He fights an inversion. Just as fast, just as strong. This inversion knows what he will do before he begins to do it, already deflecting what he hasn't yet done and hasn't even begun to think to do because it knows what he'll do before the thought can even fire through his brain.

Breathing hard, they stop to gauge each other. They slowly circle, weighing and measuring each possibility that they may implement against the other; each possibility that the other may implement against them.

They start again. They swing their fists—and do exactly what the other decides to do for possibilities and probabilities do not exist in the first place. They live only in paralleling osmosis, passing through each other's unconscious, acting on one another's abilities, doing what the other does instantaneously.

They cannot overcome the other, both using the same attacks at the same time, moving in exact versions and inversions like two wild animals baffled by a mirror, having never encountered the phenomena of reflections and refracted light before.

Levi breathes hard, growing tired. Mikasa watches him steadily, breathing a little more easily than him, already exhausted beyond physical fatigue, entering a nonexistent stage of imaginary vitality and strength fueled by willpower alone. He raises his fists, planning what he'll do next, knowing it won't matter regardless. Within the next second, Levi looks at Mikasa again, gauging, but she's no longer there. She's gone.

In front of him now rises a vessel for a great shadowy horde tower made up of a hundred dead people. The horde lunges. The entire room disappears. Covered by the darkness of a hundred dead shadows, lunging, Levi no longer stands anywhere, sucked inside a vacuum that has no light, no air, no anything, surrounded.

A hundred people attack as one. Levi's body moves on pure instinct, blocking the hundred hands, the hundred assaults, moving faster than forty, fifty people, but only half of a hundred, getting hit by the fifty others outnumbering him, not feeling it, not feeling himself doing the fighting anymore either, just doing it by mechanics, too tired and overwhelmed to feel anything at all.

He thinks that he himself is part of the horde inside the vessel. He thinks Mikasa herself is also part of the horde; that he is fighting both he himself and Mikasa instantaneously, but they're already dead, and have been dead for a long time; instantaneously fighting all the others too, everyone long dead for a thousand years, the horde of dead soldiers beating him backward, and they're all connected and feed each other the collective memory and experience, like they've consumed every record of alternate history, learned it through mastication, gnawed it, digested it, and when it assimilated with their organs, they acquired all the histories of their mothers and fathers and their mothers' mothers and their fathers' fathers, accumulated backward, going back in time to the original progenitor who had not been born from nature but had been unnaturally engineered by mankind in reckless, amoral, satirical, biological experimentation.

"Levi." His shoulders fall into Hanji's hands. "You've stepped out of bounds," she says. "It's over."

Gasping for breath, he looks down, mildly astonished to see his own two padded feet dislocated from the sparring mat, flat against a hardwood floor.

Lined to the side, clumped together in various on-looking positions, the five others gape. Their fields of view span from Mikasa still on the mat, poised, across ten feet of interval to Captain Levi standing out of bounds, their heads slowly pivoting, synchronized, in prolonged incomprehension. Blood trickles thinly over Levi's eye, mixing with salt and oil, running down his cheek. He wipes his eyebrow with the side of his hand. Red diffuses the left eye. A black bead pupil floats in the pooling socket. When he looks up, he sees only Mikasa, the horde condensed into a single solitary girl now. Hanji pats the cut on his eyebrow with a cloth. It comes away, a stain on it.

"Stop sulking. It's only a bit of blood," Hanji says. "Besides, your hideous face hasn't changed any. Don't worry."

"Yeah. And I can still see yours clearly." Hanji puts the cloth gently to his eyebrow again. He covers her hand and her arm comes away. "Unfortunately."

Before the others have a chance to decide how to react, the group opens down the middle, Historia Reiss shouldering herself through the clump of bodies. She wears a simple country kirtle. Her hair is loose. She runs onto the mat and snatches up Mikasa's gloved hands in front of her, clasping them earnestly. She has already begun speaking, but Mikasa's hearing joins the conversation a few moments delayed.

"—can't do anything about it." Historia sways Mikasa's gloved hands. Mikasa slants her face down, her hands passively swinging in front of her chest. "You're the lost descendant of the Shogun Clan. The strongest woman alive." Historia, grinning, releases Mikasa's hands to make a fist, her arm curled in a mock display of bicep. Mikasa starts to reply.

"What are you doing here?" says Jean, appearing suddenly next to them. "Shouldn't you be at the capital?"

"You can't just go anywhere you want."

"Didn't you tell anybody?"

"You're putting yourself at risk."

"Weren't you thinking at all?"

Five different faces loom over her like wooden posts, and Historia's eyes snap from one face to another, to another, one face jammed into her line of sight, then a different face jamming over the first, the five looming posts clashing for her attention like multiple bodies fighting to use a single door. Their voices tumble over each other. Given no time to think, Historia scarcely begins one response before a new question circles and strikes, nobody waiting for an answer to the last.

From out of nowhere, Mikasa touches Historia's shoulder. Her voice stands out from the rest, calm, steady, still. She says, "I'm glad you could come," and the other five voices quiet. The group seems to breathe a collective breath. They remember how to wait and listen. Then enter Hanji and Levi. The seven others shuffle sideways, making room for them, Historia at the middle. Levi removes the stained cloth from his eyebrow.

Historia grins. "Looks like I arrived just in time." Her grin is a tight, ironic, halfway anxious grin, like a face split by two contradictory expressions.

Hanji raises her elbow, chest-high, and for a moment, it seems poised in the air, partially bent. Then they see Levi standing under it. Their eyes perceive him first, then they acknowledge his stature, as if he and his stature had two separate identities. Hanji says, "He's not impressive up close, is he? I've always said that. Ever since we met. Back when he was a rookie and we all saw him fight titans for the first time, the other Scouts insisted on shoving their noses up his anus. Not me, though. 'Beginner's luck' is what I told them."

"All those titan fumes must've impaired your memory." Levi jerks his shoulder, knocking Hanji's elbow away. "The way I remember it your nose was shoved so far up my ass, my sphincter mistook your bird-beak for my colon."

"Ha ha ha ha ha!"

Levi takes Mikasa's arm. Her head jerks around, her eyes nailing to his fingers, her muscles bunching under his palm. "This subordinate of mine has grown up to be too stubborn," he says. "Despite reaching your limit a while ago, you pushed your abilities to an extreme. You'll regret it tomorrow."

With her eyes nailed to his fingers, her voice quiet and inflectionless too, she says: "I'm sure you'll regret it as well."

Hanji guffaws. Levi removes his hand, but Mikasa only levels her eyes on him with a dark unreadable calm, her muscles still bunched in her arm. Hanji says, "Mikasa, you're a pretty scary person, you know."

# # #

The military outpost is a newly renovated building. The outpost is scooped out of a large stain of trees with lawns and training areas sprawling toward the east and west. When they first uncovered the outpost, they'd found the lawns overgrown, the building in shambles, subsumed into the forest. The antiquated quarters of an old and dead Survey Corps.

It is almost dark now.

Like two ornaments in the courtyard, Mikasa and Historia stand, facing each other. They haven't been standing there long by the way the courtyard throws their frames into sharp relief. Rather than taking in the cascading fountain or the quaint garden, attention veers automatically to the two ornaments who seem to have been carved in unending conversation, one speaking, the other listening, arrested in a frozen instant forever as dusk slants across their chests. The one voice is indistinct, like a voice a person might try to remember, barely recalling an echo, a voice of the imagination.

The two heads turn, synchronized.

Below the lapsing sky, Eren rises from the distance, walking toward Historia and Mikasa, materializing seemingly out of nothing but air and wind, his hair and clothes flapped by the secret hand of an invisible force. He walks up an incline to the courtyard. His footfalls keep in time. They move mechanically as if conducted by the ticking hands of an irrepressible clock-dial. More of the rubber shoe-heel seems to wear away. He doesn't follow the lattice sidewalk, making his own path, negotiating between intervals of grass and slats of stone, going over the slats at whichever angle they cross under his mechanical feet.

"Eren, where were you?" Mikasa says.

"Just at the stables." The sun drops quickly, drawing the light farther and farther away. "So, Historia's here."

Historia's hair glints a dull colorless gray as the light dies against her complexion. Her eyes are round indigo marbles. "I already know what you're going to say. I shouldn't have gone off on my own. Right? I'm putting myself at risk."

"No." Eren puts his hands in his pockets. "There's somebody you wanted to see and spend time with." The details of Historia's face sink away as the last traces of daylight dissolve. They speak to each other in the indigo dusk, talking to each other's shadows. "Others may hold a different opinion, but you shouldn't be forced to live in a cage." Darkness overlays Eren harder than it does the other two, with his back to the horizon, the last traces of light. "But since you're here, despite military orders, you should at least make it worthwhile and be honest with yourself." He looks at Historia, but they don't see him looking; they sense his eyes. Then they sense his eyes as they shift to Mikasa. Then they sense the reverse again, his eyes shifted back to Historia, completing a conspiratorial interchange between their two opaque faces. Eren says, "You haven't told her yet, huh?" speaking to Historia.

"Told me what?" Mikasa says.

Historia stands absolutely still. The wind whirs loose hair into gentle flatters as she stands, motionless, inside the blowing kirtle dress, her body immovable like a concrete stake knifed into the ground. "Can I speak to you, Eren, alone?"

Mikasa removes her feet from the sidewalk and pilots them toward the building, starting away. Her eyes pass over Historia, seeing not her face, just the long hair and static shoulders; then they pass over Eren, who meets and returns Mikasa's stare, though Mikasa can only sense this, unable to see the details of his face, his back to the black-indigo horizon and the fixed points of celestial illumination beginning to embark on its return. Mikasa goes away and rather than listen for her absence, Eren and Historia wait until they feel her gone, not moving, not speaking yet, barely even breathing. From the lake hum nightly insects and frogs.

"Don't tell her, Eren. I'm the one who gets to decide when to tell her."

"I figured that's the reason you came."

"That's not why."

"Sorry, then."

Hidden crickets melodically rub their wings together in the grass, and frogs belch from the banks and flotsam. The moon is only a sliver. No more than the free-edge of a squat fingernail.

"I had that dream again," she says.

"It's only a dream," he says.

"I'm going back inside."

"Okay."

"Are you coming?"

"Yeah."

"Eren?"

"I'm coming."

"You're acting strange."

"What?"

"It's nothing. Let's go inside now."

Historia turns toward the building, waiting for Eren to follow, keeping her head reverted, her body twisted the opposite direction, suspended, as if a rod runs through her, staked into the ground on which she can twist one way and then the other. Eren remains standing, half-turned, his eyes locked on the envelope of night as though watching a particular subject lurking beyond Historia's eyesight. The courtyard remains empty from what she can see. Dry leaves whisper on the sidewalk. Historia turns her head around. Her laced-up farming boots beat the concrete as she leaves, diminishing, stepping into silence. Then she's gone.

The wind picks up. The insects and frogs are drowned out by thrashing forest branches. Down the stone path, Eren sees or imagines he sees a little girl standing in a white dress swept by the night wind into a fine whispering billow, revealing two little-girl legs and two dirty feet. He watches her with only the flake of morose light, slivered like the edge of a fingernail, and all the crickets and frogs filling up the darkness, and eternal diminishing footsteps echoing portentously into the past.

# # #

Without warning, Mikasa's door opens. Her arms remain stretched above her head, her shirt bundled in her hands, arrested mid-motion.

"Sorry." The door thuds closed on a face with round eyes and a mouth gaped in horrified embarrassment. Historia's voice emits, muffled, embarrassed, pressed to the door: "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude." Inside the bedroom, it is very quiet. Even the slightest sound of Mikasa walking around Historia can't detect. Hearing nothing, Historia only imagines what must be happening behind the door. She wrings her hands together, cringing.

Then the door gives in, opened from the inside with Historia leaned against it, listening. She springs back with her palms raised.

"I'm sorry I didn't knock. I didn't mean to violate your privacy."

Mikasa's nightgown paunches from her shoulders like a formless sack. Her feet are bare. "It's all right."

"Do you mind if I come in?"

Mikasa props the door open. On her laced heeled boots, Historia walks in. The bed is tucked with a pleated comforter and pleated sheets. On the dresser sits the scarf, meticulously folded. A mirror gives back the empty, neatly-tucked bed, then Historia entering the frame, gliding from the waist up, half-bodied, across the glass. She sits on the end of the bed with her hands in her lap. Mikasa sinks beside her, her head twisted over the shoulder. Her hair, still slightly damp from washing it, suffuses the immediate space with the perfume of soap. Patiently Mikasa waits.

"You probably grew suspicious because of Eren's thoughtless comment."

"You don't need to explain."

"I want to avoid any misunderstandings." Historia's eyes plunge to her hands on her lap, going sightless with thought and introspection. "It's because of you that I came. Eren—what he said wasn't a lie. There was somebody I wanted to spend time with, and that person was you."

Heat radiates from Mikasa's nightgown. The temperature rises in their proximity. Mikasa holds very still. Then Historia realizes it's not Mikasa but her own skin radiating, raising her own body temperature. It's the palpable heat of shame and something similar to longing and misery.

"I hope it wasn't a disappointment, then," Mikasa says.

"Why would it be?"

"You had to risk more than what it was worth. You were even chastised."

Historia puts her hand on Mikasa's leg, "I don't care. I don't care about any of that," and feels rather miserable. She fights with herself in an invisible struggle. A one-person battle of self-sabotage, thinking of all the terrible consequences and outcomes that could ever emerge out of a single honest error, with Mikasa's eyes resting patiently on her face. "What Eren said—No, that is—what I wanted to talk to you about—" but Historia can only cringe inside her own body, miserably, longingly, unable to summon up the courage to meet Mikasa's eyes, writhing inside the internal self-sabotage and shame, her hand lying, cool and diminutive, on Mikasa's thigh-muscle.

"If you wished to spend more time with me," Mikasa says, "I could've come to you. I didn't know that's what you—" Mikasa's eyes cut abruptly downward where Historia's fingers have groped the nightgown, bunched it in her hand, hiking up the fabric. The sight of her own unveiled knee surprises Mikasa. She watches those diminutive fingers become still, the nightgown wadded in a closed, damp palm.

"It wasn't only that," Historia says. "I've been growing tired of the same scenery every day. If only for a short while, I wanted to be freed of that place." Her hand comes open. The nightgown delicately falls back into place, veiling Mikasa's knee again, crinkled with the force and imprint of Historia's cool, damp grasp.

"I see." Mikasa rises. Every movement about her is done soundlessly. She says, finally, a little breathily, "You can stay the night here if you want."

They hear nothing of outside. Not the frogs or the crickets or the wind, hermetically sealed, insulated by white walls and solitude. Historia flops back against the bed, her arms splayed on either side of her body. "To be honest, I came here hoping you'd ask me that."

Mikasa goes to the dresser and opens a drawer and takes up a clean nightgown. Historia sits up and raises her fingers to the vest's laces and undoes the ties. The corset deflates and she removes it from her chest and gropes at the buttons down her back, reaching behind her head, struggling. The first pearl slips elusively by. Before Historia can ask, Mikasa lays the nightgown across the bed, freeing her hands to help.

"Do you mind?" Historia says.

The bed undulates. Mikasa's hands are already lifted to the first button. Softly the dress parts. Air gasps through the open slit. The little downy fuzz on Historia's neck bristles, coming to life. Historia steps out of one garment and into the other. With the nightgown dangling from her throat, she smiles, her eyes shining, as if the nightgown is very wonderful.

Walking around the room, the cotton fabric bagging from her shoulders, the hem flapping about her ankles, Historia moves just to feel her own self—limbs, neck, flesh, everything of everything—inside the parachute-like sleepwear, contained in it fully. She feels like giggling though there isn't much of anything to laugh about.

Then various objects inside Mikasa's room Historia touches with wonder and curiosity, as if they hold secrets and delightful whims planted there by Mikasa herself, not yet giggling, but on the verge of it. From the foot of the bed, Mikasa watches silently, out of a silent esoteric face, turning her head when Historia crosses one way, turning it the other when Historia changes direction, continuing to investigate Mikasa's various belongings through touch. On Mikasa's bedside table, with the bristles skyward, a brush lays, webbed with bold black strands of hair. Historia touches this too. The whims and secrets, she imagines, transmit into her and she imagines Mikasa looking in the mirror, grooming the tangles from her black hair. Then thoughtfully, Historia takes it into her hand.

"Can I brush your hair?" and Historia's eyes are shining and blue and alive when they fix to Mikasa, as if the wonderfulness has shifted from the nightgown, from all the ordinary bedroom objects, to Mikasa herself, discovering Mikasa for the first time, sitting there silent and esoteric on the bed.

"You want to brush my hair?"

"Yes." And still Historia's eyes remain fixed to Mikasa, neither lifting nor dimming nor losing their delight, as she sinks onto the bed and tucks her legs behind Mikasa, the brush in her fist. She lays the bristles upon Mikasa's crown and says, "Haven't you had anyone brush your hair before?"

"My mother."

"Close your eyes. I'll take care of you, I promise."

Mikasa stares at their two reflections sitting very close to each other in the mirror. Then she closes her eyes. The brush whispers, gentle, gliding through the hair as it pulls, hissing like a fine sheet of rain falling against the earth. There are no sounds apart from the hair and the brush and the bed and the delicate touch of Historia's fingers as they caress and part and stroke and tenderly work. And Mikasa, sitting up with her legs crossed, grows stiller, heavier, as though put under a spell, hypnotized by the simple magic of hair-brushing, already beginning to dream.

Historia puts aside the brush and lays her head against Mikasa's neck and winding her arms around Mikasa's chest, Historia embraces her from behind. "I'm very happy like this, being with you."

"I'm glad, then." Mikasa doesn't open her eyes, her voice quiet, barely audible, her hands resting in her lap. She doesn't move an inch, maybe already asleep, sitting upright, loose-limbed, her head dropped forward, slack. Historia listens to the slow drowsy breath, too slight to even stir the threads of the nightgown, and faintly feels beneath where her hands join on Mikasa's sternum the pulse of an unstirred heart.


	2. Chapter 2

# # #

The train jolts.

Their heads lurch on their necks. A whistle peals out, echoing across the country hillside. Mikasa jerks halfway around in the green-plush seat, gasping, her rigid fingers clutching at Eren's arm. Her eyes grow in her face. From the opposite booth, facing them, Armin smiles and says: "The train's about to start moving."

Mikasa's fingers retract. She sits against the seat-back, her posture too rigid, too vertical, her eyes a little too big, placing her palms on her knees. The metal framed enclosure rattles with clicking pistons and steam-powered mobility. The station trundles away, sliding backward from where they watch through the window, as if the train were standing stationary, them inside it, the platform grinding backward out from under the wheels. Eren leans against the frame, his chin in his hand. The station's shadow passes from his face as the open countryside comes into view.

"You look a little pale," he tells Mikasa. "Are you feeling sick?"

"I'm all right," she says.

Eren detects an odor. It's not an unpleasant odor, but it's noticeable, concentrated, indescribable, a living flesh smell, but entirely foreign, not like any flesh he can recall. He can't stop smelling it each time he breathes, smelling it stronger when the train sways Mikasa closer to him. The other three run down the train, plastering their faces and palms up against one window, crisscrossing the center aisle, changing seats, then plastering their faces and palms to another window. Daylight clings to their bodies in yellow sheets. Eren, Armin, and Mikasa sit quietly in the car.

"They're so lively," Eren says, holding his chin in his hand. He watches them without disinterest.

"In just a short time, we were able to build this network of railroad and connect the countryside to the coastline." Leaning forward in the booth, Armin holds his palms open, upturned, as though the palms could soak in the principles of machines and possibilities, cupping each vision preciously inside his hands. "What used to take us weeks to transport by cart will now only take us a few days by steam engine. And to think we owe it to the Marleyian volunteers. If they hadn't brought this technology across the sea, we never would've experienced this scale and rate of industrialization."

"They give us some metal and some engineering, and your feelings have carelessly flipped to pro-Marley," Eren says. "You're too eager to relinquish your trust over to the enemy."

"We're in need of allies, Eren. We have enough enemies."

The sun comes through the window and Eren closes his eyes, feeling the warmth on his face, the inside of his eyelids glowing red. The train pushes steadily down the rails. Jean, Sasha, and Connie have settled, chattering. Their conversation drifts back, rising and falling, indistinct, to where Armin, Eren, and Mikasa quietly sit. The sun slips behind the clouds, casting a gray screen over the country's undulating hilltops.

"Mikasa must not be feeling well," Armin says. They both watch Mikasa's head sway and jerk, dropped from her neck.

"She doesn't heed the signals her body sends."

"I'm fine," Mikasa says, her head still hanging, unmoving, as if she hasn't spoken at all.

Eren reaches his arm up around her shoulders and draws her against him. Where he's placed her Mikasa falls slanted, not leaning away from him, not leaning into him either, him looking down on her face, hers lifted in a kind of paradoxical astonishment.

"Why don't you sleep for a while?" he says. "We'll wake you when we get there."

"But what if the train crashes?"

Armin laughs. "If that happens, there's nothing any of us will be able to do."

"I think it'll be fine," Eren says. "But maybe I don't make a comfortable pillow," and takes his arm from her shoulders, resting it at his side.

With her face turned back, her eyes gaze at him, ponderable, a paradox, mirage-like. He might be imagining something that isn't there from the beginning. She evokes with the eyes nothing but total and absolute dissimulation, both sides of the paradox concealed from him.

"We'll be there in a few hours," Eren says. He turns his head, watching out the window, putting his chin in his hand again.

Mikasa moves in the seat. Her clothes rustle against his; she's wearing a white button-down and black pants. The moment she makes the choice to fold herself into his side, Eren feels it, buckling little by little, some parts undecided and self-contradictory, as though she has to convince each target muscle one at time to lie still. Her head drops, heavy, against his shoulder. Eren's muscles lock into a deliberate painstaking motionlessness, his head twisted toward the window, him deliberating and concentrating on complete immobility at each point they touch.

He feels her going in and out, sinking and surfacing again, one moment soft against his arm, the next moment firm and alert. He listens to her soft breathing. The trees and hills snap into frame then out of it as the train clacks speedily along. The odor flows all over him now. He knows it's Mikasa. He knows it's Mikasa's flesh. Potent, alive, foreign—foreign, he realizes, because it is ineffably female.

Then altogether her body slumps, finally relinquished of all wakefulness.

"Why do you think Historia called us to the capital?" Armin says. He leans forward in the booth again, speaking in undertone. "It must be important since she asked all of us to attend. Even Captain Levi and Hanji."

"As far as I've heard, crime and violence rates have only risen since Historia claimed the throne. Even though government officials voted unanimously in favor of the Restoration campaign, each measure taken to clean up the cities has failed."

"In that case, if the Survey Corps personally becomes involved, it's more likely the campaign'll gain some traction."

"Yeah."

"It seems a little heavy-handed. Will Captain Levi agree to it?"

"I don't think there'll be much room for objection when the order's been issued by the queen herself."

"Did Historia tell you about this in her letters?"

"Yeah."

"You two have a close relationship." Eren doesn't answer. Armin takes in Mikasa sleeping on Eren's shoulder, the gray screen of overcast darkening the two. The color has drained from Mikasa's face. If not for the inflation and deflation of her ribcage, she could almost look dead. And then Eren sits, with his chin in his hand, looking out the window with dulled, overcast eyes and a long obdurate neck holding up against the days and years like courage or determination itself, twisted away from Mikasa's dead-sleeping head, as if it takes all the determination of the impervious neck to wrench away from what lay behind his shoulder.

"What about Mikasa?" says Armin.

"That's . . .," Eren's lips hardly part when he speaks, "none of my business." He stares at nothing, his eyes trained out the window.

"You're being a little unfair."

"It's about time Historia took the initiative."

"What about Mikasa's feelings?"

"Historia will never know the answer until she asks Mikasa for herself."

"How can you expect Historia to take full responsibility? Any injury inflicted on Mikasa will have been dealt by your own hand, Eren. Don't you care at all about how Mikasa will feel when she learns the truth?"

Eren stares bleakly out at the countryside. Though they don't know it, Eren and Armin are having two entirely different conversations about the same three people, thinking they each understand the subject that's transpired, learning from each other the wrong information, knowing nothing more than what they originally did; in fact, knowing less than they had before. Eren thinks about Historia's point of view, Armin thinks about Mikasa's point of view. They are both wrong.

The sun has returned, warm on Eren's face.

It's all over him now, the living female scent, seeped into his clothes. Powerful, like a visible thing lifting off Mikasa's flesh, the tendrils writhing coolly over his face, him taking it into his lungs even if she were miles away, inescapable. The left side of his body remains stock-still under Mikasa's sleeping head. The pulse in his neck has grown very slow.

Back by the foothills, a dark seed pod blows at them from the horizon, silent and smooth like smoke. It approaches fast, faster than the train's spinning wheels. Eren squints and tries to understand what he's seeing, knowing it's not a seed pod.

"Look over there," Sasha says. "It's another train. Hello, train." She waves. It takes a full minute for the other train to impress its form on Eren's brain, and then he sees it too, the train's silhouette, and its barreling speed out of the hills. It grows upon the eye, coalescing with matter and outline. Its smokestack spears straight up, spewing low storm clouds of smoke, blackening the horizon, just under the sky.

"That's strange," Armin says. "That railway is scheduled for inspection. I didn't think it would be active for another few hours."

Eren removes his chin from his hand. "Have we slowed down?"

The hills pass steadily. The storm clouds of blue smoke roll closer. Eren and Armin stare across the booth at one another. Then they both watch out the window as the second train hurdles down the rails, seemingly silent behind the clatters of their own car. The other train gains until it charges abreast, the two sets of tracks running parallel, a 5-meter gap between them. The two trains fly like arrows, side by side, homing toward the same target. Eren stares at the train. The line of windows gives onto a shadow of booths jutting black in the shadow of passenger spaces. It's dark and deserted inside. The trains run perfectly aligned.

Raising off Eren's shoulder, Mikasa resurrects herself. Her face is waxen, at once dead, dying, and embalmed. Eren turns to her: "You look really—" But she snatches Eren in a dead-cold hand, Armin in the other, jerking them from the benches to the floor. Above them the window explodes. Glass shards spit at their hunkered backs. Wind roars past the naked open window frame. Curtains flail and twist among themselves. Another window shatters swiftly after, glass raining to the floor. Compacted between the seats, tight to the floor, Armin on the left, Eren on the right, in the middle Mikasa opens her mouth and groans. Her gut muscles contract and she spurts out a fountain of rotten juice.

On her hands and knees, she looks at Eren weakly, breathing hard, her face looking like all the stages of mortality at once: death, dying, and post-mortem. Her hand trembles; a blue-white finger gestures at his knees and the pool of broiling yellow vomit. "Sorry."

"Uh—"

"I'll buy you a new pair." On her hands and knees, Mikasa drops her head suddenly, like the neck has been snapped.

"They're shooting at us," Sasha says, shrieking from a few seats ahead. "Why are they shooting at us?"

"We need to stop the train," Armin says. The three roll over each other in between the booths, trying to move away from the window, avoiding the vomit.

Eren drags Mikasa up off the floor. "Armin. Mikasa's not doing so good." Her body droops, slack-limbed, sprawling from his arms, cold and wet with perspiration. She smells not of that indescribable female odor anymore, but like the black foam that froths out of a bloated cadaver's decayed mouth.

"You've got to get her moving at least."

Mikasa's feet stagger across the floor as the three fumble away from the window. She goes lifeless against Eren, vomiting a second time. Stomach acid seeps out of her slack jaws. Cold sweat oozes from her skin; in a matter of seconds, her shirt clings to her, translucent, ice-cold, her muscles gripped by an episode of trembling. A third window shatters. A fourth. Glass showers the booths, sparking like jewelry. They duck, their hands flying over their heads, covering their skulls.

"Head for the front," Armin says.

Mikasa fumbles on her arms and legs, her bones turned to slosh. In one arm, Eren takes her up by the waist, running her down the corridor, her feet scrambling behind them, trying to catch up. Eren halfway carries, halfway drags her, until the running feet gain traction and she carries on, keeping at his heels. They jar and bash around in the rattling jolt of the train, Eren glancing over his shoulder every now and then; behind him, Mikasa shoves off seats, her eyes embedded in soft purple-sunken sockets, her shirt melting from her frame, inundated with sheets of perspiration. They pack themselves together in the vestibule.

"Pull it together, Mikasa." Eren grips Mikasa upright. "Come on." But her knees are slosh, giving out under her weight, her eyes rolling back into her skull. Eren struggles to catch her, gathering her up into his arms, her body boneless, pouring from his hold like a sack of water. He drags her up his chest until they stand face to face, panting, her clung to him, oozing decaying death-embittered sweat, him struggling to carry her, trickling warm briny living sweat.

Jean jerks the car door. They hear the pressure of air suctioning it closed, the railroad clacks deep and muted just on the other side. Like a kiss the suction breaks. The exposed wheeling clacks gust back over their heads, unmuted, ten times louder than before. They hear nothing but the beating clacks. A funnel of wind rips around the train as if it were a bullet spinning out of an endless gun barrel, shot into space. Speed and acceleration rumble everywhere.

Moving to the next car, unstopping, Jean steps across swaying buffers and chains; beneath him, railway crossties blur with speed, giving the illusion of a single perpetual cast-iron strip. The right leg reaches to the other side, him straddling the buffers and chains, shuffling across. The rest of Jean's body joins the right leg and he yanks the second door open, palming it open as the others leap through. Eren enters the next vestibule, Mikasa clung to him, protruding from his side in a bizarre conjunction, their two bodies merged into one unit of unidentifiable tangled matter. His legs run down the aisle, carrying them both.

The door sucks closed. Jean's voice comes up from behind, rising as he gains on Eren. "What's wrong with Mikasa?"

"I don't know."

"You can't even carry her right."

They charge down a twin corridor, rows of booths on each side. Their bodies slam off the seats with the twists and jars of the train, running single file. Mikasa's feet start running again, trying to keep up, blundering down the aisle. Eren hoists her by the armpits.

"Carry her right, dammit." Jean runs directly behind Eren now. "You're dropping her."

"I'm all right," Mikasa says, running. "Please, let go now."

Down open coach to open coach, leaping across chains and buffers, they run, one after the other, in a line, getting closer and closer to the engine car. The sound of pistons and steel rises; compressed bursts of steam grow louder. They jump across one last pair of buffers, and heat blasts at their faces and clothes, invisible and heavy, as they plunge through a wavering barrier of clustered temperature. The engine broils and swelters. Against the side wall, Mikasa slumps and sags to the floor, hair covering her face. Eren crouches in front of her, catching his own breath. The breaths are shallow, suffocated by boiler heat.

"Are you okay?" he says, feeling his own voice releasing in hot blasts.

"Yes," she says. "I'm only sorry I made things difficult for you."

Mysterious knobs bulge from the transmission board. Jean fumbles at them, hoping to operate a steam-powered engine by accident. Their shirts run with dark stains. Jean flips various switches and rigs. Nothing happens. A silver chain dangling from the train's hood sways and glints. Sasha reaches for it. Connie shouts at her. Taking the chain, Sasha pulls. Mikasa covers her ears when the whistle peals out its shrill, piercing note, letting go a shaft of smoke. When the whistle dies, Jean howls over the clacking wheels and wind.

"Great. Now they know where we are."

"There." Armin points to a lever that has been tampered with, serrated metal wrapped back like an elbow. "It's been jammed."

"Now what?" Connie says.

The four meet in the middle of the car, tugging their damp shirts over their noses and mouths, breathing through a filter. They look at each other's eyes. Sasha and Mikasa wait by the side wall, breathing in the window. Eren pulls his shirt aside to speak.

"Should I use my titan?"

"We're going too fast," Jean says. "If you use your titan like a roadblock, we'll all be sent flying."

Their voices go quiet. They breathe in their shirts again, encircled by boiler heat. The train thunders down the rails. In the distance, windows crash with gunshots.

Letting his shirt come away, his face a dark raspberry color, panting, Armin says, "We have plenty of track. It's the guys on the other train putting pressure on us." Three sets of eyes watch him attentively, noses and mouths still covered. "That other train is set for Orvud District. Once they diverge from us, we can have Eren match this train's speed," He holds his hands parallel, moving them forward at the same rate, "and gradually reduce our momentum by applying an increasing amount of resistance. Eren simply needs to pace his stride and calculate how much force to use so we don't derail."

"Yeah," Connie says dryly, muffled under his shirt. "Simple."

"Eren, this requires high-proficiency over your titan along with timed calculation."

They fall quiet again. There are no gunshots, only the train's earth-rumbling headway as it hammers along. None of them look at each other. Inside the engine car, the wind sounds hollow. The heat suffocates. Their own body moisture flicks off their wrists and eyelids. Jean speaks first this time, letting his mouth free.

"No offense, but this guy doesn't have any restraint and he's not the sharpest tool in the shed. Are you sure we can depend on his titan for something like this?"

"I think he can do it," Armin says. "But it's up to Eren." He looks at Eren. Eren is looking everywhere, baking in his own skin. "Right, Eren?" Eren looks everywhere, not answering.

"There have to be other options. How about we try to find another way first?" Jean says. "Eren's titan can be our fallback for now."

"What about the guys on the other train? Aren't we under attack?" Connie says. "And can we _please_ get out of this heat. I'm dying."

Eren's eyes dart to the side wall and find it empty. His eyes continue roaming the engine car. He lets go of his shirt, his eyes still looking all over the place. "Where did Mikasa go?"

"Oh." Sasha steps away from the wall, by the window. Off to the side, she breathes easy in a pocket of fresh air. "She left while you were talking. I guess you didn't notice."

The other three turn. "What?"

"She said something about relying too much on Eren's titan. 'We can't even stop a train on our own,' and left."

"She's sick," Armin says. His raspberry color has darkened to a plum color. "Didn't you try to stop her?"

"I thought I'd have better luck stopping the train."

"Where'd she go?"

"Up that." Her finger jabs at a ladder bolted to the outside of the car, leading to the roof.

Jean claps his forehead. Sweat flicks off his face and fingers and wrist. "Has she lost her mind? The wind'll blow her right off."

"At least she has her ODM gear."

"Since when?" Armin says.

"During your boring talk. You couldn't make up your minds. I guess she got impatient."

Eren and Jean dart for the ladder. Eren reaches it first. Jean scrambles behind. Both bodies squeeze up the ladder, jostling each other for room. "Wait, just _wait—_" Eren looks below him, looking at his own footing, trying to bring his right foot up to the next rung. Jean scrabbles over him, shouting, "GO, Move_ faster!_" Eren's feet tangle up. "Get _off_ me! I'm trying—"

A sudden single blast of cannon-fire explodes nearby, just above their heads. The train shudders and jumps on the rails. On the ladder, the two heads snap backward, the two throats breaking to a near-ninety degrees. Shrapnel sprays over them. They twist their faces away, rained on by dirt and torn up metal. It dusts Eren's hair, his shoulders, like powder.

"Hurry up, Eren! Climb!"

Eren's hands and feet dig to the top of the ladder. His head lifts into the wind, hair flapping over his eyes. He slaps it away and claws up onto the roof without the balance to stand, bent on his hands and knees, his body moving without him thinking to move it.

Bits of shredded clothing and blown up body parts lay strewn around, crawling down the roof, writhing and pulsing as though moving by volition and consciousness, like it's still alive, coating the roof with ten feet of blood. Everything on the inside is laid out and spread flat and with it all unfolded, the human body appears to bundle up miles and miles of blood vessels and miles and miles of guts, all doubled up together in a tight meat package, now come undone, opened like a flower, flooding the roof in magnificent red petals. And in the middle of it, sprawled across her side lies Mikasa, limp, lifeless, choked in a dark red pool. Eren stands and feels his own blood escaping the vitals. He puts out his right foot. Then left.

The wind shoves his body down the length of train. He catches himself on his hands, and begins again. Right. Then left. His rubber-tread shoes slide, tractionless, his feet slipping under him, trying to run, right then left. His legs work clumsily, unmanageably, like a gangly-limbed calf. The world resides very tiny and very distant beneath him. His feet run, right, then left, slipping, deadness already taking his extremities, him feeling nothing of anything. The wind pushes his back, and his legs give into themselves. He drops to his knees. Mikasa lies in front of him. The wash of blood, still hot and alive, takes its time to seep through the dense wool of his trousers.

"H-hey . . ."

When he speaks, the life flies back into Mikasa. Eren can almost see it happening, his hands hovering above her, paralyzed. Mikasa rolls onto her back. Her button-up shirt lies flat against her body, soaked orange. She lifts herself.

"I am uninjured," she says, breathlessly. She mops a blood-soaked hand across her blood-soaked nose. "That man—he—blew himself up. He—did it on—purpose." Blood dyes her fingers, jammed under her nails, embedded in the lines of her palms. She pries wet hair from her eyes.

Eren stands. "Do you think you can get us to the other train?" He pulls Mikasa to her feet.

She nods and steps to the edge of the train. Eren steps beside her. Beneath them ballast blurs in the train bed. Across the 5-meter interval, the other train doesn't seem to move at all. It's as if both trains stand, stationary, suspended, as the rest of the world is sucked down a giant syphon, drawn down into a point without an origin, everything around them pulled into nothingness.

"Hold on to me."

Eren holds on to Mikasa as she measures the trajectory, compensating for windspeed and momentum. She pulls the trigger. The hooks release, whirring, anchoring into the other train's roof. The cables go taut. They sing, wrung by the wind.

Mikasa's muscles gather up and she inhales slowly. Eren's grip digs securely into Mikasa's side. She releases the trigger. The motors whir, burning up gas. The roof drops out from under their feet and they take off. In the open gap between the two trains, the wind beats their bodies, them gripping each other, flying together, as they shoot across. The steel wires scream, heating on the reels. The second train rushes to them. Mikasa lets go of Eren and they land, running into the wind, slowed by its wall of force. Their running feet drum upon the train's roof. The hooks wheel back into the spool, hot and vibrating.

They climb down a ladder identical to that of the first train. Mikasa descends, stepping under the wall of rippling wind, slipping between the two coupled cars. Things quiet when she drops below the roofs. Eren follows soon after. Once she's grounded on the platform, Mikasa holds out an upturned hand inside of which another could place their own hand. Poised on the ladder, balanced on the rungs, Eren stares at it, unrecognizing, uncomprehending, "What?" and lowers onto the platform.

Mikasa's hand falls to her side. "I'll go first," she says. "Stay close." Slowly she goes to the window. The platform groans under her footsteps. She steals a glance inside, sees it passengerless, and pulls the door open. Eren follows her in and they creep down the empty car silently, him watching their backs, Mikasa leading, ready with her blades. When they reach the other end, Mikasa opens the door and they leap to the next carriage. The next window she peers into.

Three bare heads sit above green-plush seats. Each head sits away from the others, as if each one were each riding the train alone, situated neither by the window nor by the aisle, in the very center of each seat. The heads don't move, set upon the shoulders like cannonballs, apparently staring straight ahead.

Mikasa signals with three fingers. Eren understands. She grabs the door's latch handle. The door rattles open.

Lurching out of the seats, the three cannonball heads whirl around, attached to the large bodies of adult men, dressed in unbuttoned collars. From their waists hang belts of five pockets bulging with pipes. The man closest to them has no time to register a thought. His hands grope, dying, at his throat, ribbons of blood jumping through his fingers. He screams. Mikasa is already charging the second man. In his hand a pistol flings up, pointed at her head. A bullet whizzes by her ear, locks of hair blown by the torn displaced air. Her blade takes the lifted hand at the wrist in one stroke. It thuds to the floor, the fingers still clamped around the gun's grip, the metal still alive with discharge. A second blade eats through the man, opening him from navel to spine. His mouth protrudes into a silent gasp, his tongue swelling, bulging between his lips as Mikasa jerks back, already turning, facing the third and last man.

"Get down," Eren says, but without even hearing the command, Mikasa has already ducked behind the seats, sensing the flint in the air before the trigger can be touched. Sponge explodes from the plush-back seat. She darts across the aisle, behind the parallel pair of seats. She crouches, listening. In the aisle, there is no movement, no sound of feet or gunmetal. The rattle of the speeding train continues, unbroken.

Mikasa feels her bones beginning to disintegrate, becoming slosh again. Her head sags over. She jerks it back up.

"Mikasa Ackerman," the third and last man finally says. "Look at how you've butchered my brothers. They've been strewn everywhere. You're even dyed with the entrails of my dear good brother." She hears footfalls three times, closing in. "But I guess it was his own choice to splatter himself all over you," he says. "Were you shocked? I can imagine him in Hell right now, laughing at your expression."

"Why would he go so far?" Eren's voice comes sourceless, from all directions, all at one time. It's like his voice has spoken from the train itself, from the walls, the engine. "Don't you cherish your own lives?"

Cold sweat melts the dried blood caking Mikasa's face. She rests her head on the seatback. Four footsteps move up the aisle. Her left ear rings, rising, louder.

"If our deaths mean future generations will live freely, what reason do we have to fear?" The man dives around a booth. Bullets spray the inside wall. A cluster of holes whine, almost musically, as wind blows past outside.

"Ah. You're quick. Where did you go?" he says. "There's fresh blood here. Could you be wounded?" Behind the next row he searches leisurely, patient. "My brother has tasted victory, then. Little by little we will tear pieces off you." He lurches across the aisle, behind another booth. The pipes in his belt clatter against coins and pocket-junk. "Not here, either, huh?" He sighs, extravagantly patient, without disappointment. He moves unhurriedly up the next row. "It's unfortunate we can't risk capturing you alive. You're simply too dangerous. But that doesn't mean we—"

From the ground Mikasa kicks up a leg, long and iron-strong, striking the man under the chin. His head breaks backward, almost splitting apart the vertebrae. He collapses. Mikasa walks out of the booths into the aisle and lifts her boot, stepping it square upon the man's ribcage. The bones depress and creak. She brings back her sword, the tip angled directly over his neck. The man watches her neither disappointed nor surprised, patient as ever.

"Hello. It was kind of you to show yourself to me," he says, and Mikasa glares down at him, sweating cold decayed sweat, the ringing overpowering her other senses now, "but now it's time for goodbye." In the man's hand resides a small white object. His thumb swivels to it. Mikasa grimaces, ringing, her vision going out. Eren lunges, reaching for the small white object.

"Stop!"

The man locks eyes with Eren and freezes. Eren seizes the detonator, yanking it free of the explosive pipes. The wire snaps. Sprigs of alloy wire unravel. The man never tears his eyes from Eren, frozen. Mikasa slumps backward, her head dropping, her bones halfway disintegrated, halfway slosh. She braces herself on a seat-back.

"Eren Jaeger is here," the man says, gazing at Eren, directly into Eren's eyes. He speaks monotonously, as though in a trance, enraptured by a dream, vision, illusion, or promise that lies in Eren's face. His eyes never blink; they never miss a second of the dream, vision, illusion, promise, his chest breathing heavily, rapturously. "This is Eren Jaeger and he's in the field of range and I can't detonate because it would put him at risk. Forgive me, my brothers."

"What?" Mikasa says. She shakes her head once. Then she straightens and releases the seat. The ringing deadens in her ear. "What do you mean about Eren?" She steps closer. The point of her sword moves to rest below the man's chin. The man never looks away from Eren, gazing him deep and profoundly in the eyes.

"I will speak only to you, Eren Jaeger. Come close. Ask what it is you want to know. I will answer all of your questions."

"Mikasa," Eren says. Mikasa's blade doesn't move, humming against the man's chin.

"I don't think this is a good idea," she says.

"If he wanted to hurt me, we would be dead already."

"I don't trust him."

"Me neither." They don't move, calculating the situation, the man and his profound gaze fixed intently on Eren. Eren and Mikasa both stare down at him. At last Mikasa lowers her blade. Eren says to the man: "Remove your belt." The man removes the belt holding the five metal pipes. Eren takes it and tosses it down the aisle. The metal pipes clang like brass chimes against the floor. Eren squats beside the man. "Are there more of you on this train?"

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Two."

"Where are they located?"

"The engine car."

"Are they outfitted with explosives, too?"

"No. There were only four of us. The two here, my splattered brother there, and myself."

"He could be lying," says Mikasa.

For the first time since Eren intervened, the man removes his eyes from Eren's face and glares at Mikasa. His features are implacable, unforgiving, outraged, terrible. "I would never lie to Eren Jaeger." Spittle wets his lips like a foaming dog. He shudders with fury.

"How do we know that?" Eren says. The man gazes at Eren now, and the patience trickles back into his features. "I don't know anything about you."

"You don't need to know anything about me," the man says patiently. "Just know that I place my full faith and fidelity in you." Then his hand lifts from the floor and reaches around Eren's head, and taking him by the back of the head, the man says, trancelike, enraptured, almost sighing or singing: "Oh, my good Brothers, I dedicate my heart to bring Eren Jaeger's vision of the future to life," and drags Eren's face down and sweeping back Eren's hair, he closes the distance between their faces. His eyes shut lightly. Then upon Eren's bare forehead, his lips press a gruesomely affectionate kiss. Too slow to avoid it, Eren is caressed into the kiss, his hair falling over their joined faces.

Mikasa shakes and burns. Driving her hands between their chests, she breaks the two apart, one hand forcing Eren backward, propelling him across the aisle, the other snatching the man by the shirt, slamming him against a seat, her fist crushing his shirtcollar. Her face is very calm, practically devoid, but the eyes are too wide, the pupils too small, compressed into cold piercing needle-points. Under her hand, the windpipe clamps and groans.

"Get your filthy mouth _off_ him," she snarls, her face almost without expression, without anything, her eyes very wide, her cheeks dull and red. "Eren, please keep your distance from this pervert heretic. I knew he couldn't be trusted." No sounds come from behind her. Mikasa twists her neck and finds Eren capsized across the aisle, close-eyed, his head fallen, jammed between two seats like a puppet with its strings cut.

Red drool lathers between the man's teeth as he laughs, crumpled against the seat, sagging under Mikasa's loosening hold. Then he scrubs a tongue over his lips, slurping up the drool running down his chin, collecting it in his mouth as Mikasa turns her head, facing him again. With vicious precision, he squirts saliva into Mikasa's eyes. She flinches, lifting her hands to her face, blind, and launching bodily from the seat, the man tackles her onto her back, seizing her by the wrists, pulling her arms apart on either side of her shoulders.

He hisses _ha-ha-ha-ha_, in a wash of heavy damp pants, into her ear, his breath boiling with fury. He uses his whole body like a lumbering galloping horse on top of her, forcing her to feel his fury with the thumping gallops as he hisses every unprintable name for what she is and what she has, and what he will do and what they will do, and _that red scarf_, flattening her with his whole body-surface and momentum in physical debasement, breath escaping her under each gallop, her two abased legs flapping, jolted, on either side of his haunches. The whispers against her ear form inside her head an image of red tissue paper overflowing an empty undersized envelope, and more paper is added, and more paper, and more, until the seams of the envelope burst apart.

Then his weight careens off her, two full bodies rolling side over side, crashing into a row of seats. Coming out on top, Eren wrestles the man onto his belly, pinning his hands behind his back. Mikasa wipes with her wrist the saliva from her eyes and stares at the ceiling, still on her back. Emptiness stains her eyes and face. With saliva pooling from his mouth, the man says, _Like stuffing,_ and then slowly with a slow rise like a siren, _And I'll stuff it with my fists until_

Eren wrenches him into an abrupt monosyllabic wail, then jerks him by the hair and slams him silent against the floor; a second time, wringing his head up, Eren smashes him into his own shrieking nosebleed, his nasal cavities flooding with a fresh well of blood. His mouth hangs, crooked, pink gums framing pink-stained teeth, the lower half of his face profusely coated as though with ruby paint. Eren releases him.

"We need to stop the other train," he says. Mikasa stands. Eren raises his head, following her with his eyes, her face still a little empty.

"Put him against that seat." Eren puts him against the seat. Mikasa uses cable to bind him hard to it. The flesh of his arms protrudes, blue, strained, folded over the cables, quivering.

"I'll use that red scarf," he gurgles, thickly, for only Mikasa to hear, drooling, already swollen and augmented into a caricature boiled egg-shape. Then he starts to make a piercing sound; it's a sound like a gutted horse, rising in pitch and volume and fury. His nostrils expand, the thin cartilage hardening and shining. Under his brows, his eyeballs protrude like ivory door knobs.

Eren yanks the man's foot out of his boot, then out of the sock. The undressed foot is wrinkled and bright white, almost blue, cracking on the floor when Eren drops it. The man howls as though syringes of rust have shot through his leg. The emptied sock Eren takes and crams into the man's mouth.

"Let's head to the engine," Mikasa says.

They start down the aisle. The man wails in the chair, the cables digging into his arms, cutting the blue fat flesh like a can opener, whinnying like a horse with the sock crammed in his gullet, until they disappear out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

# # #

The trains steadily plunder over the country.

When Mikasa and Eren reach the engine car, Mikasa, in a token of silence, lifts a finger to her mouth. She and Eren slink up, flattening on either side of the door. Their clothes hang, weightless, like the train's speed outpaces gravity marginally, their clothes lifting, suspended.

Mikasa reaches for the latch handle. Before she can pull it open, Eren snatches her by the wrist. He shakes his head. They stare each other in the eye and argue in silence across the door. They don't reach an agreement. Coupling chains clatter and sway. Pounding pistons exhale loud plumes of angry steam. Mikasa lets go of the handle. Eren lets go of her wrist. They look each other in the eye. Then Eren goes for the latch handle and Mikasa snatches him by the wrist. They stare each other in the eye again. Beneath the hammer of pistons, they speak tautly at each other.

"They won't hurt me," Eren says, his head twisted across his flattened body.

"How do you know that?" Mikasa's head is twisted too in a mirror of Eren, but with an elusive quality, as though she can change dimension to effortlessly merge with any material or surface.

"They don't have explosives," he says. "I'll go first this time."

"We don't know that for certain. Please stand back."

"You're not yourself, Mikasa. You're—"

"Get back, Eren." Mikasa's grasp tightens on Eren's wrist, hurting him a little. Eren stares at her fingers, making no sound or sign that he's being hurt. She says, "I'll handle this," and her voice is seemingly cold, a little harsh.

"I used to think you were this way because I was weak and couldn't do anything on my own," and Eren's voice isn't that of a fifteen-year-old. In the four years since he was fifteen, he's grown by ten years, maybe twenty years—an incalculable number of years. Rather than demand to be understood as fifteen-year-olds do, his voice appeals to understand.

"That's not—"

"It was annoying. A constant thorn in my side." Mikasa's grip sags on his wrist. Strings of hair fall in brittle jagged clumps. "But I've spent some time thinking about it and I don't know what it is or for what reason." He looks at Mikasa, trying to read something in her face that she perfectly conceals in language and suppression. In her eyes, there is only injury.

"Armin was right," Eren says bleakly.

"Armin?"

"It's nothing." Eren reaches his hand away from the handle. "I noticed a bit ago the cab's empty." He comes away from the wall. "Go ahead. I'll follow you."

The engine door sucks open. Mikasa charges in, swords lifted, jerked across her body. The blades quiver.

In front of her lies the car deserted. The boiler swelters, unattended. Steel tools lie about: wrenches, cylinders, wires, a spare coupling rod. On the side wall, a chain with mighty inch-wide links hangs in jangling coils from a hook. Eren squats through the door. Mikasa's blades clash back into the containers. She goes to the transmission board. Eren moves beside her.

"Did that pervert heretic lie to us?" she demands.

"I don't know. But that's not our biggest problem." Eren hauls up the industrial chain from the hook and displays it in his hands. "It seemed like you had a plan earlier. What do you want me to do?"

# # #

At the very front of the train, on top of the roof, Mikasa stands close to the blue sky, looking out ahead, estimating the amount of track they have left until the junction will arrive. The mountains and hills are stationary swells, scalloping the landside. Wind rakes crusted fabric from her skin to blow scratchily around her wrists and sides. Her hands are set, quick, on the ODM triggers. Around her shoulders, the industrial chain is fastened like a forty-pound harness, crisscrossing her chest.

The horizon never grows any closer, moving backward and out of reach, as the trains charge straight into it.

On the parallel track, the other train matches hers. Smoke belches from the stack. Gas wavers the cab's window like an illusion. Through the square opening comes Armin's right arm and shoulder and finally his head. His arm flags her attention. He shouts. The sound of his voice dies before it reaches the other train.

Mikasa releases the triggers and her feet are carried from the roof. She fights the wind across to fix to the other train's face, turned to it, poised on her hands and feet like a rock climber mounted to a cliff. The train's forward speed plasters her against the grill and presses her down under an invisible wall. She lugs the chain off her shoulder and hitches it to the grill, then pulls herself higher, straining, upon the train's face.

The wind flatly pushes her down and strikes the back of her head, whipping hair forward, into her eyes. From a higher angle, she turns half-way and calculates trajectory. The hair blows sideways, wind swishing down her ear canal. She determines a mark on the second train and shoots. The hooks anchor precisely. She flies across, slicing through the storm of speed and momentum, and hitches the chain to the second train's grill, yanking it taut. She lets go. The chain stretches across, linking both trains at the face as they pound over the earth, evenly matched.

Mikasa vaults to the roof. Balancing in a crouch, she lays her weight low and with the ODM gear, she chocks herself in place, a hook fastened on either side of the train. She thumps her boot twice.

At the signal, inside the engine, Eren seizes the brake lever. He applies the brake increasingly. The metal and gears scream. The screams rise on a scale with greater protest as Eren drives the lever back with wrist and shoulder-power. Pistons spew compressed air and a great cloud of vapor engulfs them. The train judders as the wheels squeeze harder to a standstill. Eren drives the lever further back.

The iron grills rattle and groan where the trains connect and fight each other. The industrial chain screeches and shudders between the two opposed forces.

Eren and Mikasa's train jars forward haltingly as each car in the chain butts into the one in front of it, in a sequence of jolts. Eren strikes the transmission board on his hands. Mikasa lurches against the cables on the roof. Speed drops by several notches. Then the train limps unevenly for a bit before dropping several more notches. The brake clamps the wheels into total static position. Now the two trains fight for control.

The pistons of the first train pump and work resiliently, hammering unstoppably. The second train is dragged, screaming, as though in agony, red sparks spraying up behind the clamped, static wheels. Eren releases the brake, his fingers cramped and red. He stretches them and wonders what to do now.

The side door busts in and bursts off the hinges. Eren startles as Mikasa crashes inside. The bent pane of door-metal bashes around, alive. Mikasa's feet thud to the floor, solid like a hundred pounds of iron, and she stalks to the transmission board violently, her footsteps violent with heaviness.

"You scared me," Eren says.

"Can we switch it to reverse?"

Eren investigates the unfamiliar switches, controls, and dials. His mind can't work past the unfamiliarity, the alien engineering, to even begin to think up an idea of what to try.

"There has to be something," she says violently.

"Mikasa. We've done what we could." He looks at her. "We're moving slower so I should be able to use my titan without endangering anyone."

Mikasa lays her eyes on him. The violence is gone from them, but there's something worse than violence, the expressionlessness, dangerous unreadability. Then she goes to the backdoor and holds the door open, and Eren ducks his head through. Behind him the door closes.

# # #

With their prisoner in tow, gagged, Eren and Mikasa have climbed onto the roof. The train screeches. Sparks burn the rails and shower down in an orange glowing rain.

Eren backs up to the far edge of the train and bends his arms and legs, charging, building power to launch into a run. Finally, he tears across the roof, his long legs not moving fast exactly, but pumping with immense strength and fortitude, running him faster across the roof than he appears to be running, faster than he could ever appear to run; then at the edge of the train, his long legs leap him, forever, into the air. His teeth pierce his hand and the atmosphere splits open, letting out yellow atomic spears of light that touch Eren at the head, enter him, and flow joltingly through his spinal column to strike the ground and spray out, hissing, in shattering streams of electricity. Light overtakes the sky in an explosion, and dims.

Mounds upon mounds of muscle, flesh, and bone swell tremendously from Eren's body until he sinks under it, buried alive with veins and arteries throbbing to the surface. Oversized lungs rumble with massive squalls of air. A face, cropped with skull teeth, set with deep erratic eyes, emerges; an angular grotesque face which gives the impression of the bones themselves laying outside the flesh, thrusted skyward in a fixed expression of infinite rage, unforgiveness, and fatalistic despair. The train sparks, grinding past. From where Mikasa stands on the roof, the titan slides backward, the train plugging on ahead.

Then Eren turns and begins to run. His massive feet pound the earth, his titan growing larger as he gains speed. Mikasa stands at the train's edge, waiting, gripping their prisoner by the cables that bind his arms and legs together. When Eren's titan runs by, the ODM wires spring out, sinking deep into a muscle-mound. Mikasa flies onto his shoulder and crouches by his ear, grabbing the titan mane in a fist, holding the prisoner by the cables with the free hand. Eren heaves forward. Mikasa steadily holds on.

Eren's feet kick up broken plates of earth and grass, rumbling the continent with his running. The black shaft of smoke tracks backward. Eren reaches the smokestack. He runs faster than the train, racing to the front of it. His hand extends. Mikasa lurches when the train rams into his palm. Eren molds the train into his hand, reducing the shocks and jolts of impact. Crossties rupture under his feet and his footsteps create mini earthquakes, crushing the ballast to leaden grains. The gears, still trundling inside the motionless wheels, burst and crumble from the axels. The train slows and then it comes to a halt. Hot compressed vapor hisses from the pistons, hot metal whirring and groaning like a great sizzling caterpillar. Eren's muscled titan arms drop to his sides.

The heretic sits very still beside Mikasa. His eyes are very dark and gruesome with awe.

# # #

The double doors of the entrance part and daylight shrieks into the capitol. Sunshine scorches the glossy floors. Historia squints at the six black outlines stepping into the foyer.

First to appear is Eren carried under the arms, Connie on the right, Armin on the left. Eren's head is sagged over, his face carved with titan marks. Then Jean moves out of the sun, shoving forward a man whose hands have been bound. A bruised nose bulges from the man's face and dried blood shines on his upper lip. One eye is swelled nearly shut.

"What happened?" says Historia.

"We were hijacked." Armin breathes heavily under Eren's weight. "Eren stopped the train with his titan and carried us the rest of the way. It must've done a number on him. His stamina seems to have declined."

"It was the heat," Eren says, and doesn't lift his head. The top half of his face is hidden under droopy shapeless hair. "It felt like my titan was melting me."

"And this guy," Jean jerks the bruised man forward, "was stopped and detained by Mikasa."

"What—" Captain Levi walks past the others briskly, with purpose. The others watch him sharply stop in front of Mikasa— "do you think you're doing, dirtying this carpet?" Clumps of hair stick to Mikasa's scalp. She palms her abdomen. She looks down at her boots smearing the nice patrician entryway rug.

"He kissed Eren," she says abruptly. The others stare.

"Excuse me?" says Jean, incredulous.

Mikasa's head jerks up with a terrible black glare. "That pervert heretic," she says. Then snarls. "He _kissed_ Eren." She gropes savagely at her hip.

Hanji clamps Mikasa's shoulder with her fingernails. "You wouldn't go around killing important witnesses, would you?" The four short fingernails dig into Mikasa's shoulder. Mikasa's hand settles on the grip of her sword without taking it into her fingers. "We haven't learned what he knows yet. So you won't kill him. Right, Mikasa?"

Levi seizes Hanji's arm, drawing her away. "Stand back, Hanji. She's filthy."

Connie jabs Eren in the ribs. "Don't tell me that was your first kiss."

"It doesn't count," Mikasa says snarlingly.

It's quiet for a moment, the sets of eyes on Mikasa standing, one hand against her abdomen, the other at her hip, caked in the crusted dried human guts, her upper lip wrung over her teeth. Levi watches her with a severe motionless darkly quizzical face. The others watch, silent and rigid, made embarrassed and uneasy, holding in the slight urge to laugh.

Without raising his face, his head sagged over and hidden in the drape of overgrown hair, Eren says, "He recited something like a pledge. He promised to bring my vision of the future to life."

"Could it have been hero-worshipping?" says Armin.

"Excuse me?" Jean is even more incredulous about this new scenario. "Who in their right minds would worship somebody like _Eren?_"

"Right minds?" Connie jabs Eren in the ribs again.

"Humans will worship anything that can be bent to their ideals," Sasha says. "Even a guy like Eren." Then she clasps her belly and makes sure everybody else is watching when she groans: "Ohh, I think I'm having stomach pains." Her eyes glitter. She puts them on Historia meaningfully.

Historia says, "I'm sure you're starving after having such a hard morning. We don't have anything like Nicolo's cooking here. But we have plenty of it."

The others stir with movement, about to go and do what needs to be done while Sasha fantasizes about a plenteous lunch spread. Then everybody stops as the man in Jean's grip begins to struggle. His lip squeezes up on his gum and doesn't sheathe the long teeth when he speaks. He makes sounds like a parrot, senseless with meaningless repetition: "Like stuffing," he says.

The others quiet, their faces turning to him in silent expressionless observation. "Till the guts burst. Then my brothers will feast and drink the bones dry and savor the sweet thick marrow of victory." He continues like a parrot, cyclic, making sounds, gritting the long, unsheathed teeth: "Stuffing, stuffing, stuffing, stuffing—" They watch silently. A few faces twist with revulsion.

Jean shakes the man. "Shut it." The man's head rolls. He gurgles softly. Jean's hands grip him around the upper arms and shake him again. The man's head rolls back and forth.

"What a nut-case," Connie says.

Armin and Connie and the others watch Jean jostle the man away, gripping twists and pains into his joints to mute the man and drive him forward. The man's legs stumble in the direction Jean jerks him. Like a baby, the man gurgles saliva in his mouth.

Supported by Armin and Connie's shoulders, Eren hasn't moved, his head still hanging. The others watch the two backs move jerkily across the lobby, and Mikasa palms her gut like the bowels might tumble out. Around Eren's head, locks of hair begin to drift and flatter. Armin's wrist-hair prickles. Where he brushes Eren's side, waves of energy radiate.

Mikasa puts arms to her sides, and Historia sees the red blood on Mikasa's palm and races over, bringing her hands together, lacing the fingers in sympathetic prayer.

"You've been injured."

"Not really."

"Come with me." Historia takes Mikasa's arm and wraps it over her shoulder, too small to be of any real support, and guides Mikasa away. Historia's heeled boots clack profoundly, Mikasa in muted rubber just behind. They pass the others and their surprised faces, and Eren's head strained and finally lifted; the others watch the girls glide by, the two walking straight while looking at one another. Everything else whirls away behind them with an indifferent sighing flap of Historia's dress.

# # #

The Master bathroom cuts back from the main building in a great marble shine. A round bath sinks into the floor like a pond in miniature. The marble floor gives way to a gold rim, then a neat drop leads to the tiled tub. Historia turns the shiny faucet-head. Water pounds down.

"We need to get you out of those clothes."

Mikasa unbuttons the shirt and tries to shrug it off, but the shirt remains tenaciously sealed, clinging, as though its atoms have fused and bonded to hers and if she were to strip off one, she'd be stripping off both, left in only a skeleton cage and fleshless pulsating organs.

Historia says, "You'll have to soak before we can get you out." She pushes up her sleeves to the elbow and removes her boots and goes, barefooted, across the bathroom to the mirrors and sinks and cupboards. Copper hinges creak when she opens a cabinet. Inside items shuffle about themselves. The doors creak closed. Historia brings back a bucket.

"All right. Go ahead and sit in the tub."

Mikasa steps into the tub and doubles up her legs. Historia fills the bucket. Warm bath water flows down over Mikasa, and the shirt material soaks it up. The bucket fills again and the shirt fattens and loses its adhesive quality. This time when Mikasa tugs it off, the shirt comes away. Her arms peel from the sleeves. Historia takes the shirt, brown with watery dried blood, and bundles it in the sink and returns to Mikasa, still doubled up, in the bath. Seizing Mikasa by the hand, Historia pulls her to her feet and as she rises, a small rip in Mikasa's side gasps open, fresh blood filling the rip and spilling over. Historia uses her fingers to gently palpate the skin around it, feeling what may lie underneath, unseen.

"There's shrapnel lodged inside," Historia says.

"It's all right." Mikasa steps up and out of the tub and moves to the vanity. She massages the wound, letting out more blood, and kneads the shrapnel to the surface.

"Mikasa," Historia says.

Mikasa puts up a hand. Historia closes her lips and watches. Water rings in the bath. Pink rivers flow glisteningly down Mikasa's hip. She uses the pointer finger to sink into the gash, submerging it to the first knuckle.

"Gently, Mikasa, gently! You'll cause more damage!"

Mikasa's finger retracts, pink-stained, scooping out a silver fragment the size of a pill. She sets it on the counter. Historia seizes Mikasa by the arm and turns her around.

"You can rely on me, Mikasa. I want to help you. Ymir let me help her. It didn't matter that she was strong." Historia looks Mikasa in the eyes and then her hands reach and frame Mikasa's head with palm and wrist. The sheet of black hair is caught and sealed to Mikasa's ears. "It's okay. We're friends, aren't we?"

Mikasa moves her lips slightly and looks out between Historia's hands through her impenetrable black eyes. Though Mikasa is an immobile- and impenetrable-faced woman, Historia knows that Mikasa always feels whatever anybody else is feeling all the time. That Mikasa understands and reproduces the emotions of those around her secretly. The others don't know this, thinks Historia. _Only I do._ This is because she's figured it out through careful attention and observation. And Historia has figured out that Mikasa not only feels in secret but that she also speaks in secret, too.

Historia holds Mikasa's face in her palms, and Mikasa stares back steadily, full of all the secret things hidden under her immobile face. An exchange passes between the two. "Thank you," Mikasa says, and Historia deciphers and understands.

"Tell me what you need," she whispers, caressing Mikasa's cheeks, "and I will get it for you."

Inside Historia's palms, Mikasa's face hasn't moved, all the activity and feeling laying under it, hidden, but Historia knows and understands all the concealed things that Mikasa will never disclose.

Mikasa's side leaks blood. Below the guts and intestines, Mikasa's pelvic muscles contract, dull and aching, deep in the untouchable interior of the body. Nausea begins to well up.

# # #

The meeting room and the long table down the middle of it seats twenty people. Three military officials sit around one end. The press stand off to the side. A journalist scrawls on a notepad without ever seeming to pause or look at the lines, flipping the page when he fills the paper, without a single downward glance. Nile Dok stands at the head of the table, an uncurtained window letting in light behind him. A map is fanned out between the hams of his palms, his arms propped upon the table.

"I know we're all killing ourselves trying to find a solution to the international threat. But we can't desert efforts to secure the interior. If we're not annihilated by Allied forces across the sea, then we'll perish of self-annihilation." Nile pauses and looks at the faces sitting at the table without seeing or acknowledging any individual.

"Go on, Nile. Nobody's stopping you."

"I know it's Military Police affair, but we're formally soliciting the aid of those soldiers in the Survey Corps. You won't have to do any of the muscle labor. Just your presence and name will be enough to broadcast a message underground. Think of it as the springboard to get the gears going. Civilians don't fear or respect the police anymore. These days, it's about Titan-killers."

"You can drop the ingratiating flattery, Nile."

"Besides look at your own men." He waves his hand at the five present who'd been on the train, still wind-blown and carrying a sense of unstoppable speed. "They were attacked today, not by foreign enemies, but by men born on our own soil."

"Do you know anything about the nature of the attack?" Hanji says.

"Sure. It's the work of an organized group. We don't know what they want or what they aim to do. But they've been using explosives in sporadic attacks against the public. There've been no patterns or trends as far as we can see. And by the time our forces arrive, the group members are already blown to bits."

The faces watch Nile around the table in perfect military posture, except Captain Levi who watches Nile from a complacent, slouched posture of indifference, one leg crossed over the other. "Sounds like your lot's done nothing, but choke the slums with your piss."

"There is one thing." Nile waits and lets the suspense grow, making his information all the more crucial and desired. "A tattoo." He touches the left side of his chest. "Here. It's part of an induction ritual. That's how you can identify the members." He waits and takes in the faces around the table. The Survey Corps share a single non-expression of unamazement.

"Yes," Hanji says. "We know about that."

"What?" Nile looks at Hanji then at Levi, and now Levi withholds, the suspense growing again, but with double the intrigue. Double the desire. Nile understands. "You've detained one," he says.

Levi says nothing.

"So I take it you'll lend us a hand, then."

"No."

"Captain." Eren halfway rises out of his chair.

Hanji grins and clamps Levi on the shoulder. "He's joking. Of course, we'll help."

Nile relaxes. He is satisfied with this.

"For a quarter of your funds this month and your meat rations, and all the alcohol you currently possess."

Nile is not satisfied with this.

"Oh, right. And your black tea."

"Why the alcohol? Most of your branch is—"

"Great. It's settled, then. Squad Levi will infiltrate the cities for reconnaissance. They'll look out for men with a tattoo on the left sides of their chests." Hanji grins. Nile is not satisfied. He yields despite the dissatisfaction, and Hanji gives Levi a successful conspiratorial thumbs-up.

# # #

In the dining room, there is food and drink and talk. Joining the military officers, there are gentlemen and rich people. The rich wear their wealth while the soldiers wear slacks and threads. Sitting at a long, clothed dining table, Eren uses the back of a silver spoon like a mirror, seeing behind him rich people and MP officers talking and drinking. Their teeth and tongues show when they talk and laugh. A man in a suit digs at the folds in his neck, but refuses to unbutton his collar, the dress shirt pinned tight to his jugular. Eren watches him struggle with the neck folds. Then the man's eyes drop and catch Eren's in the spoon. They look at one another, not knowing if the other has intended to look and watch. Eren spins the spoon around in his hand.

The military had debriefed him and Mikasa, extracting information and dredging up clues and signs that he and Mikasa hadn't known were clues and signs. At the end of it, they had left with only confusion and bafflement about what they'd been asked and if their answers were what they'd actually meant to say. Somewhere in the middle of it, they began to realize they weren't saying anything of what they intended to say and, somehow, it was the military officials making them do it, puppeteering them to say what they didn't mean. They left, confused and frustrated.

Linen ruffles across from him. A plain dress brushes the floor. Eren looks up and sees Mikasa with her platter of food, wearing something that she's borrowed, and looks back down, swooping his spoon into creamy broth that he'd never have outside the capitol.

"You look better," Armin says.

Mikasa takes up a loaf of bread from her platter. She parts it in two. The loaf seems to melt into halves.

"You had a hard time today," Eren says, flooding his spoon. He lifts it and blows wind at the steam. "You should eat well and rest." He dumps cooled broth onto his tongue.

"You too." Mikasa puts the other half of her loaf on his tray. Eren stares at it. He reaches for it.

"This helpless bastard?" Jean's face is incredulous and indignant, jealous and outraged. "If you hadn't slowed the trains down, Eren couldn't have done a damn thing."

"And what exactly did _you_ do," Eren says, "Jean-boy?"

"Would you shut up about that, already? It's been five years."

They glare at each other. Mikasa picks the spoon from her platter and fumbles it. The spoon clinks to the floor. Both Eren and Jean lurch out of their seats to retrieve it. Their hands compete and cram over one another, their fingers groping and knocking each other away. Armin offers his unused spoon to Mikasa.

"Thank you," she says, and takes it and dips it into her bowl.

Jean and Eren both look at Armin, Jean with a shade of disappointment. Eren sits back down. Jean sits back down and leans his chin sulkily in his hand.

"Are you sure you're feeling okay?" Armin says.

Mikasa nods and sits with her hands in her lap and gazes across the table at Eren with her calm, still eyes. "Did you get enough to eat, Eren?"

"Ah—" Eren tries to respond, but water enters his mouth without him knowing he's taken the crystal glass in front of him and tipped it to his lip. When he feels the water gathering in his mouth, he tries to activate the throat muscles but there's no reflex. He tries to fill his esophagus but nothing is there to pull it down. With nowhere to go, the stagnant water leaps from his tongue and splashes across his lap.

"Hah. Nice, Eren."

Eren wipes his lips on his sleeve. His eyes don't raise or look at anyone, and the others go still, waiting for him to explain. "You really scared me today," he says. "I thought you'd been seriously injured."

The others resume eating. Forks and spoons strike ceramic bowls and plates. Connie and Sasha grin and pour broth into their mouths, straight from the bowls, still smiling somehow as they drink it down.

Jean sits tall, unimpressed, his arms crossed. "I was scared Mikasa would be seriously injured by _you_. Dragging her across the floor like a moron. Can't you even carry somebody right?"

There's no itch or prickle, but Eren reaches to the back of his neck and scratches with his nails. "Y-yeah, that was . . . Sorry." He glances up at Mikasa without moving his face, the whites of his eyes showing under the irises. His palm goes still and cradles the neck.

The others eat and drink, and fill their stomachs generously. Sasha thrusts molasses-flavored crackers in her mouth, chewing them to mush. Without swallowing, she thrusts in more crackers, her cheeks stretching over the growing mounds like squirrel-pouches.

Sitting straight-backed with her hands in her lap, Mikasa gazes across the table at Eren and her lips come together, softly and mysteriously. Eren gazes back at her, the white still showing under his irises.

Mikasa speaks secretively, to only Eren across the table, and nobody hears her besides Eren, or maybe he's the only person paying attention. "My talents lie in many areas," she says, and there are no signs of braggadocio or pride. "But when it comes to dying, I'm hopelessly talentless. On me, your worries are only wasted."

"That's . . ."

"It's selfish," she goes on, "but I'm glad you thought of me a little. From now on, I'll work harder so you won't have to concern yourself again."

Eren says nothing, thinking, _I don't know the reason, or why_—and scratches the skin on his neck, though there's nothing to itch. His fingernails scrape the skin until it rashes over.

# # #

A dream is sliced off from her brain, hacked off jaggedly, without warning. Mikasa's eyes snap open. If she's slept at all, there's been no resting. Symptoms of the dream linger, her body coated in sweat, her pulse racing. Her legs swing to the side of the bed and her feet connect with the floor. Her feet take her to the bedroom door and lead her out of it and into a phantom hallway filled with nighttime. Then her feet carry her down the hall and she has no control or influence over the feet. She's only an involuntary passenger, riding the movement, looking out of her eyes as the walls go by. It's no different from riding the train, looking out the window, watching as the hills fluctuated across the horizon.

Then the feet begin to slow. They slow down as if someone has whispered her name; slowing as if to give her time to answer the whisper. But nobody has spoken, and she says nothing back.

The hallway splits and doubles and divides, becoming two hallways at two right angles. She starts to go right. The moment she turns, she feels that someone has been there a second prior to her turning. As if someone had been waiting and dissolved to shadow the instant she began to face them. There is nobody now, nothing, the hallway cutting straight backward into prolonged emptiness with only the faint suspicion that somebody else might have been walking down this hallway too, just a second ago.

Mikasa continues, involuntarily, with the feet taking her forward, without her being a part of it, just going and turning around corners, walking down hallways that continue to double and divide, deeper and darker, a labyrinth of halls and doors. Suddenly the feet stop. She stares down the hall. Her eyes drain, focusing inward at the internal environment as she feels her own pelvic muscles agitatedly squirming inside herself. The feet have halted to let the muscles squirm and wrestle themselves like a nest of toxic worms.

Something seeps out of her.

She cringes.

She palms her abdomen, feeling dull inward inaccessible pain. Then the pain ebbs and the feet start to walk again. They pick up speed. They turn into brisk running barefooted footsteps and she finds herself chasing after the presence from before, the nothing that dissolves into shadow. Running now in her bare feet, she finds the presence just barely beating her around each corner, down each hallway, her chasing it involuntarily, moved by the will of her legs alone, with no control, no purpose, just running and chasing.

Then the feet stop again. She stares and waits, wondering why she's stopped. Wondering why she's been running in the first place. A faint ineffable flesh-smell rises and brushes her nostrils. It's her own body making the smell, she realizes, and something more slithers out of her.

This time the muscles doesn't squirm. It just dumps out of her, wetting her underwear. She grits her teeth, cringing, and bundles the nightgown in her hands and lifts it. The cotton white undergarment is revealed.

From the black empty halls, down the labyrinth of passages and doorways, where somebody could be waiting, lurking, a sound like a gutted horse wails. The wail rises to a dying scream, rattling the walls, shaking the floors. It's the walls themselves screaming. The building itself crying and wailing.

The undergarment reddens between her thighs.

The red slithers out of her own body, flowing, until the skin of her pelvis creaks and stretches with a sound like fabric yanked from two opposite corners. Her inside muscles shift and shed and wriggle like worms. Without making a sound, she jams her hand up between her thighs, her arm plunging into a mysterious pit, wrist-deep, and wrangles the red out, panting, sweating, dragging it out with both hands now, inch by inch, the walls still shaking and wailing, the building still crying with agony.

Mikasa's hands tremble, extracting it completely until it all comes out and she holds the red scarf like a surgically removed organ in her blood-varnished hands. Her face, when she stares out at the night-filled phantom hall, is entirely empty as the sound of the dying gutted horse swells up, the whole building quaking with the screaming dying whines—

Eren's eyes tear open. His back muscles spring from the bed. The hair on his neck jabs straight up from his body.

He shivers and breathes hard, unsteadily. His shirt sticks to his back. He writhes it off and gets to his feet and goes to the window and parts the curtains. The metal drapery rings hiss on the railing, and he looks out. The stars are sparse and dull. Heat emission from crowded sleeping bodies wash out most of the other silver points. The night is one drab color stained evenly across the sky. He sags into a wooden desk chair.

The bedroom door opens. He swings around. Historia slips in, more shadow than body, and closes the door.

"Why are you all sweaty?" she says and invites herself to the bed. The sheets are flung about, retching from the mattress. A large dark spot stains the pillow cases where Eren's head had been tossing and turning. "Did you have a dirty dream?"

"Do I seem like the kind of person who has dirty dreams?"

"You seem like the kind of person who needs to have dirty dreams."

"So do you."

"What do you mean? I have dirty dreams at least every month."

Historia watches Eren's face in the dark. He sits in the chair, angled away from her, looking out the window.

"You don't know much about women, huh?" She waits. Eren sits perfectly still.

"I usually dream about Mikasa. But you probably already guessed that. It's a pretty convenient reminder. I always know when I'm going to start bleeding."

She watches Eren again. He sits at the desk, looking out at the night, seeing things. "You're a good listener, Eren. I feel like I can confide in you about all my womanly struggles."

He slowly turns his head, making himself move at last. The right half of his face is dark with an even darker hole for an eye. "Are you trying to screw with me? Why?"

"I guess I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to be like Ymir." They look at each other without seeing each other in the dark. "She knew what buttons to push to get others to disclose their suppressed feelings, even their most hideous and shameful ones." The room is quiet. Outside, there are no sounds of nature. Eren turns to the window again. The back of his head is a flat black cut-out. "Still, she never criticized others for having those feelings even when most people would." Historia looks in the mirror and watches the image sitting with a statuesque detachment on the bed. "It's just—you can confide in me too, Eren. Even if it's something that I won't be able to relate to. Even if it's something hideous and shameful. For a long time now, you've been restrained like you're holding a lot inside, trying to deal with it all on your own. You can place your trust in me."

"Yeah." Eren leans forward and curls his arms on the desk and sets his chin on his arms and the night covers him up. "I trust you, and everyone else." The dull city stars are stabbed like pushpins into a flat black board.

# # #

The Survey Corps gather in a confidential circle. It's morning, about 8 AM. They've already dressed and eaten. The capitol is alive with movement, organized feet and voices sounding through the halls. At the entrance, the Survey Corps confer in their narrow secretive circle, speaking in internal voices that don't carry outside their circle. Light burns through uncovered windows and sprays off the floor patina.

"Our prisoner was found dead in his cell this morning," Hanji says. "Suicide is the most likely cause of death."

"What a nut-case," Connie says.

Levi hears oncoming feet at a distance and puts his voice low. "Or somebody wanted to make sure he wouldn't leak any information." They wait for the walking feet to pass by before continuing their conferring.

"But for somebody to get into the holding cell," says Armin. "Gaining access from the outside would be difficult."

Light bounces on Hanji's glasses. A moment, her eye vanishes under the glare. "The matter's currently under investigation. The Military Police will inform us of any clues they find."

"The Military Police," Jean says, and looks over his shoulder at the room. "Are you sure we should trust them?"

"We have to," Armin says, "until there's evidence suggesting otherwise."

"How'll we find his associates now? We've got no leads."

"We'll start searching the cities," Eren says. "The plan hasn't changed."

"That's right. So—" Levi turns. He shoves open the double doors. Daylight obliterates him from view and he's just a disembodied voice speaking out of a piercing wall of morning light: "What are you still doing standing around? Get moving."


End file.
